Peter Hitchens, Wednesday Night's Debate:

The reason for this feeling of queasy discomfort is of course that Britain has in the last century ceased to be a Christian country in anything but name.

We don’t read the Bible. We don’t go to Church. We don’t believe the Creeds. We don’t sing hymns. We don’t think Christ rose again or that there is a life beyond the grave.

And we think that those who do think this are rather weird.

Take me, for instance. Hardly a week passes by without someone describing me as a ‘Devout Christian’?

You might think that I go about with a barbed-wire garter tightly wrapped round my upper thigh.

Or that I end each evening, after beating my children severely, by reciting two or three long, penitential psalms.

No, I am not remotely devout by the standards of any age. I am an ordinary backslider, who loses his temper and eats too much and does many other wrong things each day between sunrise and sunset.

But I attract this nonsensical description simply because I openly say that I am a Christian believer. Such people are so rare in my generation and my milieu that the assumption is that we must be fanatical, pious and in many other important ways bizarre.

This came about mainly because of the decline of Christian faith, common to most of Western Europe but particularly severe here. This was caused mainly, in my view, by the First World War, foolishly and wrongly supported by the churches of Europe.

But the fading of faith was not specially welcomed by those among whom it faded, and it suited most people to continue to behave as if we were still a Christian country. What’s more, many who did not believe in God recognised the social benefits of faith, and were happy to see its outward forms observed.

Now we have reached a new stage.

One. Christianity is in conflict with the modern attempts to replace it – specifically the ‘Human Rights’ movement which is a substitute for a God who has been officially declared dead in Europe (note His absence from the EU constitution despite the undoubted fact that ‘Europe’, a political entity, is an entirely Christian construct) gives the liberal state – or liberal supranational institutions – the supreme power to order the unruly wills and affections of competing pressure groups, and their conflicting desires.

And also with the modern state ideology of ‘equality and diversity’ not only a respectable name for political correctness but also the title of a more or less Marxist ideology.

Two. Christianity’s message is specifically unwelcome to many people, most particularly because it tells them that there are some things they cannot rightfully do, which they would like to do without any feelings of guilt.

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